May 5, 2017
Dear Members of our Campus Community,
It is my great pleasure to announce the appointment of Professor Joseph Incandela as Vice Chancellor for Research.
We are grateful to our search advisory committee – led by Chair Art Gossard and CoChairs Galen Stucky, Craig Hawker, and Kum-Kum Bhavnani – for conducting a rigorous national search for this important position. The members of the committee are listed below. We would also like to thank our Academic Senate Chair, Executive Vice Chancellor, Vice Chancellors, Deans, faculty and staff colleagues, researchers, and many members of our campus community who provided important consultation, input, and advice throughout the search process.
Professor Incandela has held the position of Interim Vice Chancellor for Research since March of last year, gaining tremendous insight into the responsibilities of this leadership role.
Dr. Incandela first joined our campus community in 2000 as a professor in our Physics Department, after spending about a decade at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2013, he was appointed as the inaugural Joe and Pat Yzurdiaga Chair in Experimental Science.
For the past two decades, he has been involved with the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), initially leading the construction of a large part of the tracking system for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. In early 2011, he was elected to be the leader of the CMS experiment, involving more than 3,000 scientists and engineers from 39 countries, and the following year, on July 4, 2012, Professor Incandela announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, more commonly known as “the God particle.” He is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences; a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a recipient of the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as well as the 2013 European Physical Society High Energy Physics Prize. In 2016, he was selected as our UC Santa Barbara Faculty Research Lecturer, our campus’s highest research recognition.
He has been an active participant in our campus governance, serving as a current member of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Faculty and Staff Housing. He previously served as a member of the Chancellor’s Design Review Committee and the Academic Senate’s Council on Planning and Budget, chairing the subpanel on Social Sciences as well as Capital and Space Planning.
We are grateful to Dr. Incandela for his exceptional work as Interim Vice Chancellor. He brings this first-hand experience as well as three decades of scientific scholarship, leadership, and service to his position as Vice Chancellor. Please join us in extending our warmest congratulations to Joe as he takes on this important new leadership role.
Sincerely,
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor